Childishness As Resistance

They have a ‘child-like’ playfulness. I’ve heard this said about people, sometimes people have said it about me. It is said as a compliment, usually, although it can be used to patronise and put down. That’s when ‘child-like’ becomes ‘childish’. A few letters between being perceived as adorable or pathetic.

Why have we been raised to believe that play belongs exclusively to children? It fits the colonised narrative for us to believe that play is a temporary need that gets replaced by ‘adult things’ like extractive labour and heteronormative relationships and reproduction, and our once expansive desire to explore, discover, learn and create through play can be squashed into ‘hobbies’ for those who are wealth and time privileged enough to access them.